Comment by labrador
2 days ago
Musk has a good understanding of what people expect from AI from a science, tech and engineering perspective, but it seems to me he has little understanding of what people expect from AI from a social, cultural, political or personal perspective. He seems to have trouble with empathy, which is necessary to understand the feelings of other people.
If he did have a sense of what people expect, he would know nobody wants Grok to give his personal opinion on issues. They want Grok to explain the emotional landscape of controversial issues, explaining the passion people feel on both sides and the reasons for their feelings. Asked to pick a side with one word, the expected response is "As an AI, I don't have an opinion on the matter."
He may be tuning Grok based on a specific ideological framework that prioritizes contrarian or ‘anti-woke’ narratives to instruct Grok's tuning. That's turning out to be disastrous. He needs someone like Amanda Askell at Anthropic to help guide the tuning.
There is this issue with powerful people. Many of them seem to think success in one area makes them an expert in any other.
> Musk has a good understanding of what people expect from AI from a science, tech and engineering perspective
Genuinely curious, what evidence leads you to this conclusion?
Musk leads engineering teams so I assume he has a better sense about what engineers need from AI than most. I think it's a safe assumption, but I could be wrong. My point is he has no sense that an alt-right AI is offensive to most ordinary citizens. I wouldn't expect Musk to have a good sense of that.
> Musk has a good understanding of what people expect from AI from a science, tech and engineering perspective, but it seems to me he has little understanding of what people expect from AI from a social, cultural, political or personal perspective. He seems to have trouble with empathy, which is necessary to understand the feelings of other people.
Absolutely. That said, I'm not sure Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and others are notably empathetic either.
Dario Amodei has Amanda Askell and her team. Sam has a Model Behavior Team. Musk appears to be directing model behavior himself, with predictable outcomes.